Hi, The fonts I would use in MSWord being absent from the choice within the NW Pro, I tried Didot but it is not very well contrasted (I mean its black is leaning toward grey). It seems that only the Times New Roman is ok (and more or less acceptable in my eyes). Would you recommend some fonts to use in view of future publication as well as private printing of NW Pro docs ?

Thank you; you are right, it works simply that way. Right now I am struggling with Nisus Writer Pro, which changes the fonts in some of my defined styles and I do not know how and why. Sometimes it goes to a SF thing and some other times returns to Times New Roman within the same style of the same document (it is a Footnote style). Since Word crashed for me, I have not been able to find a stable Word Processor. I like the use of Nisus, which is very friendly, but I hesitate to go on with such an instable Word Processor. I surely will have to get used to another one. Sighs...

NEWS ABOUT CARDO (a version of Bembo)
4/20/11 Cardo 1.04, a major update, is now out. It includes:
§ All medieval charcters found in the MUFI Recommendation 3.0.
§ Many new characters for Roman epigraphy, including glyph variants accessible through OpenType features as well as the private use codepoints.
§ Retrograde glyphs for the Old Italic characters.
§ A completely rewritten manual and a revised InDesign test document.
§ The first Cardo bold ever; limited character set but functional for many things such as headings.

If you haven’t already done so, please check out my recent book Document Preparation for Classical Languages. The PDF and paperback versions are not expensive and you might learn something useful about fonts and how to use them! Information about the book is here. You can download Cardo 1.04 as a zip file from this link. The InDesign test file is available separately here. Enjoy!

A couple of issues with the Hebrew characters have been brought to my attention by users (thank you!); they will be fixed in the next version. The Cardo 1.04 zip includes only .ttf versions, not .otf. In the future I may be able to provide .otf versions also.

4/16/11 Be careful of unauthorized versions of Cardo. I have learned that there are several font sites offering Cardo for download in versions not created or approved by me (in violation of the terms of the Open Font License). These versions offer a very reduced character set, including only the Basic Latin and Latin-1 Supplement ranges of Unicode, with no OpenType features. While I am not aware of anything harmful about these versions, they may confuse some people who have heard that Cardo contains a large glyph complement that is useful for scholars and/or supports high quality typography via OpenType. If these aspects of Cardo are important to you, be sure to get Cardo only from my site and pass this information along to your colleagues.

Text Box: abc2/25/11 The first version of an italic font to accompany Cardo roman is now available. It contains a very large number of Latin characters (only a small percentage of the medievalist characters from the MUFI recommendation are not yet done) plus the usual punctuation and numbers. Greek and the remaining Latin characters will follow as soon as I can. It also contains the following OpenType features: old style numerals, proportional numerals, standard ligatures, discretionary ligatures, historical forms, and historical ligatures.

I have tested this font on my system, but one never knows what will show up after a font makes its way out into the world. So it might be best to regard this as an advanced beta version. If something doesn’t work right for you, or if you see things that don’t look good, please let me know. As with recent versions of Cardo roman, the italic is released under the Open Font License.

You can download Cardo italic from this link.

This zip file contains two versions of Cardo italic. Both are OpenType fonts; one has TrueType outlines (.ttf) and the other PostScript outlines (.otf). Characters and OpenType features (ligatures, etc.) are the same in both. On my Windows system the OTF has a better on-screen appearance, but this may vary depending on your monitor and graphics card. Don't install both at once! In the future I may distribute Cardo only as .otf font files, but I am interested in hearing if people need or prefer the .ttf format.

Future plans: after a long hiatus away from font development due to book writing projects, I have returned to devoting serious time to Cardo. Once this italic font is out, I will finish a revision of the roman font, bringing it up to date with Unicode 6.0 and version 3.0 of the MUFI recommendation. Look for this in March. During the summer will come either an expanded italic with Greek and the remaining Latin characters, or the first release of Cardo bold; or, dīs maximē faventibus, both.

5/25/10 version .99 of Cardo is posted. This is mainly an update for the license information, as explained on the main page of this site, although a couple of small items are also fixed. The manual is still at version .98; ignore the license information contained in it.

Note: links to download the font are found at the bottom of this page, as is a more detailed update history.

GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT CARDO
Cardo is a large Unicode font specifically designed for the needs of classicists, Biblical scholars, medievalists, and linguists. Since it may be used to prepare materials for publication, it also contains features that are required for high-quality typography, such as ligatures, text figures (also known as old style numerals), true small capitals and a variety of punctuation and space characters. It may also be used to document and discuss the features of Unicode that are applicable to the these disciplines, as we work to help colleagues understand the value (and limitations) of Unicode.

Cardo is freely available (subject to the terms of use below). I do have one request: if you find Cardo useful, or if you have suggestions for improvement, please email me and tell me about what you are doing with the font. Knowing that people are using Cardo makes the time and effort I put into it worthwhile.

ORIGIN & DESIGN
This font is my version of a typeface cut for the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius and first used to print Pietro Bembo’s book De Aetna. This font has been revived in modern times under several names (Bembo, Aetna, Aldine 401). I chose it mainly because it is a classic book face, suitable for scholarship, and also because it is easier to get various diacritics sized and positioned for legibility with this design than with some others. I added a set of Greek characters designed to harmonize well on the page with the Roman letters as well as many other characters useful to scholars. The Hebrew characters are designed to match those used in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia as closely as possible and so have no claim to originality.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
This is a large Unicode font.

For Windows, you need at least Windows 95 and a word processor that can handle Unicode-based documents: either Microsoft Word 97 or more recent, or OpenOffice 1.0 or greater. (For more information about OpenOffice, a full-featured, open-source suite comparable to Microsoft Office, click this link; note however that Open Office does not yet handle characters in the supplementary planes.) You will also need a way to enter the Unicode characters; either Word’s Insert/Symbol, a Unicode editor such as BabelPad (plain text only), or my own keyboard utility. If you want to use Hebrew in true right-to-left fashion, you must have Word 2000 or XP running under Windows 2000 or XP, or OpenOffice 3.2 or more recent.

On the Mac, you need OS X plus a Unicode-aware editor or keyboard utility. Mac Word 2004 and 2008 handle Unicode well; Word 2001 and Office X do not. OpenOffice for OS X works well with Unicode, although it does not yet have the standard Mac interface; you need to use the X11 windowing system. Mellel, a word processor for OS 10.2 or later, is very affordable and handles Unicode and RTL text nicely; it is also the first Mac word processor to support OpenType features. Recent versions of Nisus Writer are Unicode-based. You can also use Apple’s TextEdit (installed as part of a default OS X installation). If you are using an editor or word processor that is designed for Unicode, you can use the Unicode Hex entry method or the Extended Roman keyboard.

For Unix/Linux systems: As far as I know, Cardo works on any Linux system that supports Windows-style TrueType or OpenType fonts.

If you are not clear about what all this means, see my book about word processing issues for scholars, which provides a good introduction to Unicode and other font issues.

I dropped MS Word in the early 90s for Nisus Writer – so I really don't know. But if migrating from Word for Windows think about installing the MS fonts that come with Word for Mac – the naming conventions of fonts are different and maybe cause the trouble!

Thank you Elbrecht. I guess that the many problems I encounter with Nisus (still using it for now) are related to a specific feature of the app, which is that every document has a different treatment. For example if I enter some glossary entries in one document, I do not find them in another document. The same with the Style Library, there is one for some docs and another one for some others. I do like NW Pro, and I wonder if there is not a way of unifying and systemising the way it works for all docs I open with it (I first save them in .rtf format through LibreOffice).
Nevertheless something with the original fonts in the Word docs seems to resist (sorry for this very vague indication), for from time to time, the font in the footnotes is not the right one. For example, from within a document where the style for footnotes has been clearly defined, when I enter a new note, I then have to apply again the Footnotes style, for the new footnote has "returned" to Times New Roman (which I did not use in Word).
It is this lability of the app. which makes the use uneasy till now.

Yohanan wrote:if I enter some glossary entries in one document, I do not find them in another document.

Is this a joke? Anyway, this does not make any sense at all. This is like saying: My apartment has 4 rooms, and when I fetch a bottle of beer from the kitchen and place it on the table in the living room, I notice that there are no bottles in the other rooms, so there must be something wrong with the apartment.

A glossary is a file inside your Glossaries folder with the ending .ngloss. The folder's name is "Glossaries." You can enable and disable glossaries in Nisus preferences > QuickFix. You can have your entries (= abbreviations) expanded as you type or not. — If you have a glossary file enabled, then it's ALWAYS active, in ALL your documents!! This means: every time you type an abbreviation in a document, it will be expanded, no matter in which document you are.

If I misunderstood something, please explain with more details.

The same with the Style Library, there is one for some docs and another one for some others.

This is absolutely incorrect. You have obviously not yet understood what a Style Library means. It's a file with the ending .rtf inside a folder called "Style Library." A style library file is a REPOSITORY for styles. You decide which styles you store in which style library, or, alternatively, you can put all your styles into one file/style library. Thus Nisus gives you a maximum flexibility for your workflow. —When we talk about a "Style Library", we usually mean a file that stores styles (and you can give that file whatever name you want.) The file resides inside a folder called "Style Library" (whose name should not be changed); so this could perhaps lead to some misunderstanding.

Think of the "Style Library" folder as a large warehouse or department store with many booths. Each booth corresponds to one style library and stores styles for a particular purpose, just as a booth in a warehouse stores related goods and items. For example, you may find socks and underwear in one booth and shoes in another booth. If you are in a Nisus document and need a particular style, you just go and fetch it from one of the booths, so to speak.

1.jpeg (13.12 KiB) Viewed 1883 times

If you rent an apartment in Europe, it's usually unfurnished, so you go and fetch furniture from the department store. In the store, everything you need for the kitchen is in one place, and everything you need for the bedroom is in another place, etc.

I wonder if there is not a way of unifying and systemising the way it works for all docs I open with it

So you basically want Nisus to automatically strip all styles from a document when you open it for the first time and instead automatically import all the styles from your favorite style library. Maybe Philip can tell whether this can be done with a macro.

In the meantime, you can use a simple macro to change the font and delete all styles in the document before you import your favorite styles. I use the keyboard shortcut Command+f+t to start this macro.

# This macro changes the font to Times and then switches to the Style Sheet View. It will also select all the styles in the document so you just have to hit the delete key to delete them all from the document. Then click the "Import from Style Library…" button and import your favorite styles.
$selection = selection length
if $selection == 0
Select All
End
Format:Font:All Fonts:Times
View:Style Sheet
Select All

I first save them in .rtf format through LibreOffice.

Since those are Word documents, why don't you use Word to convert them? Only in case the documents are so old that the current Word version can't open them, I would use LibreOffice.

Nevertheless something with the original fonts in the Word docs seems to resist (sorry for this very vague indication), for from time to time, the font in the footnotes is not the right one. For example, from within a document where the style for footnotes has been clearly defined, when I enter a new note, I then have to apply again the Footnotes style, for the new footnote has "returned" to Times New Roman (which I did not use in Word).

I think the problem you are referring to is the *conversion* of the original Word document. Depending on the complexity of the document, some elements may not be converted correctly, no matter which word processor you use, but the good new is: there is no other word processor that can fix this as easily and quickly as Nisus. If the font in the footnotes is not the right one after conversion, you simply run a macro to fix it, and often that may not take more than 1 second. So I really wouldn't consider this a problem.

Don't forget also, you can select ALL your footnotes in one go and apply changes to all of them simultaneously, such as changing the font and size. Here is how to select all footnotes at once (this is a quote from Martin):
1. Click into any footnote editing area.
2. Use the Select All command once (eg: the keyboard shortcut Command + A). That will select all of a single footnote.
3. Use the Select all command again to expand the selection to all footnotes in the entire document.

I thank you all for the good will and availability. Right now I am almost obliged by the timetable to go on with NW pro, but as soon as possible, I will try to switch to another Processor hoping for something more stable, accepting the fact that it might be somewhat more rigid and less user friendly than NW Pro. Maybe the lack of stability and consistency of the Program is due to its great subtlety which is pleasant and attractive. Many thanks again to you all.